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Ghost Ship Residents of the Outer Banks awake on the morning of January 31, 1921, to see a beautiful five-masted sailing vessel aground on a sandbar at treacherous Diamond Shoals, where many ships had met their end. Strangely, no distress signals were flying from the ship, but two lifesaving crews struck out for the ship anyway to remove the crew. Seas proved too heavy for them to reach the ship, and they had to turn back. They did get close enough to see the ship's name, Carroll A. Deering, but they were surprised that no crew members were to be seen on deck. Lifesavers finally reached the ship the next morning to find no crew at all, only a cat. Food had been cooked and the table prepared for the crew's meal, but nobody had eaten. Nothing seemed amiss, except for a missing lifeboat and some disorder among the captain's maps. The crew was never found and no bodies ever washed ashore. Several weeks after the ship ran aground, it was dynamited as a hazard to navigation, but residents of the Outer Banks still talk about the mystery of the ghost ship. In 1982, Melvin Kooker, over of a commercial haunted house in Virginia Beach, built a landlocked model of the Carroll A. Deering at milepost 16 on the US 158 bypass at Nags Head and opened it as "The Ghost Ship." The five-masted triple-decked model, 110 feet long, provides the setting for the retelling of the story of the Deering with live actors to visitors who are guided through the ship. It is open Memorial Day to Labor Day for a fee.
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